Revoltec Fightpad Advanced

Over the last few weeks we've seen gaming keyboards, gaming mice and new cases come out of Revoltec as part of its new range. Now, latest and last in the new line is the Revoltec Fightpad Advanced, a dedicated gaming keypad designed to go alongside the disappointing Fightmouse and surprisingly decent Fightboard.

It sports the usual set of features; macro keys, semi-lame support software and a carbon fibre paint job, that we've come to expect from dedicated gaming pads. However, the problem with pads like this is that if they ever want to have an impact on the market then they have to have something a little special, something a bit above the norm.

Gamers as a group will stick with their chosen gaming setup come hell or high water. It feels familiar, comfortable and homey to them and they don't want to leave it. Believe me, I struggled on for years before forsaking arrow keys for a WASD setup.

Hands down

Giving the Revoltec Fightpad a once over didn’t exactly leave us reeling in excitement. Flipping it round in our hands and having a bit of a play with it, we were instantly dubious of its size and 'S' shape, as well as the placement of some of the buttons.

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Placing a hand on the keys in the natural position immediately reveals a flaw in the design, namely that the little finger, which would fall on Shift/Ctrl for most people and which is usually mapped to crouch, falls on volume control for the Fightpad – obviously not a great thing to end up muting the game when you actually want to hit the dirt.

The Fightpad has a handful of other design problems of that we were immediately aware of, mainly involving the top rows of buttons – substitutes for F1 to F12 – are impossibly far to reach without moving the whole hand, which kind of defeats the entire point of the pad. There was also a lot of criticism levelled at the faux carbon fibre decoration. Call us snobs if you want, but to us it just looks a bit tacky. It would have been far better to render the whole thing black to match the rubberised grip surface.

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We spent a while wondering about the rubberised wrist support and how we felt about it exactly. On the one hand we were worried that it may chafe and rub at the heel of our hands – which are very delicate and pampered (Fairy Soft - Ed.) – but we also recognised that it was essential to stop slippage on the weird 'S' shape of the Fightpad.

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